The Yoga Slim 7i ProX is a thin, light laptop with high performance, at least compared with other laptops of the same size. Looking at the outside, you would never guess how strong the hardware inside is, roughly on par with a midrange gaming laptop: a Core i7-12700H, an RTX 3050 graphics card, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.
And yet the Yoga Slim 7i ProX weighs just 1.45kg and is only 15.9mm thick. It looks like any ultrabook with a P-series CPU, and in fact many manufacturers put Alder Lake P or similar CPUs in laptops like this one. With a high-performance configuration, Lenovo clearly wants to cover as many needs as possible and make this laptop more versatile: it can handle work, games and creative tasks alike.
A good-looking, sturdy design in a nice color
Let's start with the design. To me it looks great, and it carries the signature Yoga design language of simplicity and soft lines. Setting aside the many stickers Lenovo puts on the machine, it really is a clean, simple laptop.
The color deserves a mention. It is not the rather boring black or gray; the blue on this machine feels fresh and fun to me personally. It is not a deep navy either. Lenovo calls it Dark Teal, but to me it looks like the blue stone used in building houses: attractive yet strong, and cool to look at.
The body is all metal, full aluminum, with a CNC-machined A cover and a bottom D cover made of stamped aluminum with vents for cooling. Lenovo's build quality is good: it feels solid and sturdy, and you can barely find any flex on the A and C covers. The D cover, however, seems to use slightly thinner aluminum than the A and C covers.
The edges are rounded with a matte finish, much like what phone makers often do. A rounded frame is a signature Lenovo design choice; few laptop makers pursue it today, and most go with sharp or square edges. Lenovo also uses a center hinge on this laptop. It is quite sturdy and lets you open the lid easily with one hand, a small detail Lenovo clearly paid attention to.
The hinge opens all the way to 180 degrees, which is handy for some meeting scenarios.
If your hands sweat a lot, you may not love this finish, because it picks up fingerprints easily. I don't have sweaty hands, so I think it's a nice design, but it may not be the same for everyone else.
Moving on to the keyboard and touchpad area, the layout is a familiar one without a number pad, and I like that. Typing on the Yoga Slim 7i ProX feels pretty good: the keys are bouncy and responsive, and the spacing is sensible, though the keycaps are flat rather than slightly dished like on Lenovo's other laptops. As I said, Lenovo reinforced the C cover well, so there is no keyboard flex at all, and typing feels comfortable and confident. Another special touch is that the backlight has an automatic on/off option, which uses the webcam above the screen to decide.
Lenovo also places the speaker strips on either side of the keyboard, with a total output of 4W, tuned by Harman/Kardon and supporting Dolby Atmos. Sound quality is decent: not outstanding, but not bad either. Compared with the Yoga 9, though, it falls short.
The touchpad below is fairly large (80 x 135 mm) with a glass surface. It supports the Precision Touchpad driver, and multi-touch and tracking are very accurate.
The ports on the Yoga Slim 7i ProX are fairly complete for office needs: a USB-C Thunderbolt4 port (Power Delivery 3.0, DisplayPort™ 1.4, data transfer), 1 HDMI 2.0 port, 1 USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port (with always-on charging for phones, headphones and more), a 3.5mm jack and a camera kill switch.
Overall, I like the design of this laptop. It is simple, and blue happens to be my favorite color, so I like it even more. It is a bit heavy compared with other 14” laptops, but the performance is also higher, so that is understandable: Lenovo needs a cooling system that suits the hardware.
A great display
The Yoga Slim 7i ProX has a high-resolution 3K (3072 x 1920) PureSight display. It uses an IPS panel with a 1500:1 contrast ratio, wide 89-degree viewing angles (left/right, up/down), a 16:10 aspect ratio and 100% sRGB color coverage (67% Adobe RGB and 65% P3).
The display specs of this Yoga Slim 7i ProX are very appealing. On top of that, it has 400 nits of brightness, is color calibrated before it ships, supports Dolby Vision, and has a 120Hz refresh rate (dynamic, folks, varying between 60-120Hz). Lenovo sells the machine with many display options, but the default resolution is 3K, with no Full HD or 4K option. One detail to watch for is Dolby Vision: Lenovo offers 2 display options with identical specs, both with an anti-glare matte coating, but one has Dolby Vision and the other does not. The picture below will make it clear.
Also related to the display is the webcam cluster, which supports IR face unlock through Windows Hello (FHD 2.1MP resolution) and offers some features I find very useful. For example, it detects when you are using the computer and keeps the screen on, or automatically dims the brightness if you are still sitting in front of the computer but not using it. It also adjusts brightness based on the open window (if the window is dark it lowers the brightness, and when you return to a white window it raises it again) and adjusts the screen's color temperature to the ambient lighting. Some of these features are built into Windows, while others were added by Lenovo, making the experience better.
With a screen this size, plus the 3K resolution and the default 200% scaling, I find it works fine and still shows plenty of information. If you want more, you can scale down to 175% or 150%, but the text will no longer be smooth and will show jagged edges. The bezels of the Yoga Slim 7i ProX are not especially thin, unlike the Dell XPS, but overall they are fine. They are still plastic, though, and for a laptop priced at around 40 million VND I would expect a slightly better finish, such as glass covering all the way to the edge of the frame.
With the factory color calibration and the many display options, you can see that Lenovo wants people to be able to use this laptop, and its display in particular, for as many needs as possible. In my own view, though, Lenovo is aiming at creative users who work with images, video and text but not at a very professional level, such as YouTubers or TikTokers.
Versatile hardware
As I mentioned at the start, the Core i7-12700H and RTX 3050 are more than enough for office tasks and calculation-heavy work. If you are a data analyst working with Excel, SQL and data retrieval that is not too complex, it can still handle that. As for gaming, this hardware is certainly enough to play esports titles with no worries: CS:GO, Overwatch, Valorant, LoL and the like won't trouble this laptop. Still, hardware that is this versatile is sometimes not entirely a good thing in one respect.
What I mean is that this configuration is overkill for office work, while for gaming it is really enjoyable, since playing AAA games at the resolution the Yoga Slim 7i ProX has, or even at QHD, is quite a struggle. Neither the Core i7-12700H nor the RTX 3050 in this laptop is the most powerful version of its kind. Lenovo ships the machine with a 100W charger, which shows that both the CPU and GPU are limited in performance to some extent, specifically in power draw. Although the PL2 limit is 80W instead of the manufacturer's designed 115W, the Core i7-12700H in the Yoga Slim 7i ProX still holds steady at 55W, peaking at 80W, but at that point the temperature reaches 96 degrees C, so the machine cuts power draw back to the level above to bring the temperature down to 87 degrees. The P-core clock is then about 2.8GHz and the E-core clock is 2.4GHz. That is for the multi-core CPU test, with the machine at maximum performance.
What's more, the GPU driver installed by default on this laptop is the Studio driver, which shows that Lenovo aims this laptop more at creative work such as photo editing, video editing and design than at gaming. I ran FurMark on the RTX 3050, and the GPU drew 55W, averaged 45 FPS and reached 80 degrees C. Over 10 minutes of FurMark, the machine throttled exactly once. I also tried Clipchamp with a video of almost 5 minutes exported at 1080p, without many complex layers, just simple cuts, joins and added text, and the machine handled it. Clipchamp is a pretty good and interesting video editor that is basically sufficient, and I'll share more about it with you later.
The Yoga Slim 7i ProX also gives users 3 performance modes: Intelligent Cooling by default, then Extreme Performance, and finally Battery Saving.
For cooling, Lenovo fits 2 fans and 2 heat pipes, which is fairly basic. In my testing, the CPU temperature often hit 95-96 degrees C, at which point the machine automatically cuts clock speed and power to bring the temperature down to the 80s. That temperature is acceptable for normal use.
<sUpgradability on this laptop is limited to the SSD only: there is a single M.2 NVMe slot that supports up to 1TB, and the SSD inside is already 1TB, so you can consider it non-upgradable. RAM comes in 2 options, 16GB and 32GB LPDDR5, so consider your needs and choose accordingly.
Battery & wireless connectivity
The Yoga Slim 7i ProX has a 70Wh battery, and according to Lenovo the laptop can last 11 hours of video playback. In my own use I got about 5 hours on my everyday tasks, including web browsing, listening to music, typing, and editing photos in Lightroom, all in the default mode.
For wireless, the Yoga Slim 7i ProX has Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.1. If you were worried about the Wi-Fi card in this line, rest assured that the version I'm using (model 14IAH7) has an Intel card, not MediaTek.
Packed with handy software
On Lenovo laptops in particular, I find the company includes a lot of utility software, and most of those features are useful. The most obvious example is a special function key on the keyboard called the Smart Key. Press it and you can choose to open Lenovo Vantage, Lenovo Smart Appearance or Lenovo Voice.
Zero touch login and zero touch lock are really useful, folks. I just step away from the machine and it locks itself, which is very handy for the times you forget.
Lenovo Vantage will already be familiar to anyone who uses Lenovo laptops. It helps you manage performance, the camera, the microphone, the battery and more, acting as an overall management app for the laptop. Lenovo Vantage on this Yoga Slim 7i ProX also has a great many smart features, for example Zero Login (walk up to the machine and it logs in automatically with Windows Hello), Zero Lock (walk away and it locks the screen automatically) and X Power (overclocks the GPU to work better with graphics software). There are also Air Gestures for seeking or play/pause when watching full-screen video, but in my experience it is less convenient than using the keyboard, unless your hands are too dirty to touch it.
Lenovo Voice lets users give voice commands for tasks such as opening File Explorer, raising or lowering the volume and more. It is pretty fun to tinker with.
Finally, Lenovo Smart Appearance is the software for adjusting the webcam with effects such as background blur, face tracking, and even retouching your face like a smartphone selfie camera.
After using many Lenovo laptops, I find that this software and these features are an indispensable part of the experience and give Lenovo laptops their distinct character. Manufacturers today also put a lot of effort into adding smart features to their laptops, which not only makes them more convenient to use but also makes them more competitive against other brands.
As noted, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i ProX is a versatile, all-purpose laptop for almost every need. It has the shape of an ultrabook, with nothing bulky, heavy or flashy like RGB LEDs, yet its hardware and display specs can satisfy you across titles from esports up to AAA games at moderate settings.
Source: Tinhte.vn
